Simple Simon

by William Poe

  “Wow, you didn’t even squirm,” Ernie said, stopping short of my elbow. “Jay never got that far up my arm. That’s where I’m ticklish.”

  “Now that I know, I’ll win every time,” I said.

  Ernie grinned. “I won’t let you touch that part of my arm.”

  For several nights, Ernie stayed over and we played the game. We often started laughing at the very thought of it. Then, without explanation, Ernie stopped coming over. Vivian telephoned to ask if everything was okay, but Mrs. Corley only said that Ernie wasn’t feeling well.

  The afternoons dragged. I missed our expeditions through the house and our adventures in the woods. Connie left each day to visit friends or spend a few hours answering phones at the agricultural extension office. The only person around was Mandy. I wanted to go outside and play with Ernie, not remain stuck inside the house making sure Mandy didn’t fall down the stairs.

  In the evenings, I tried to get Vivian to play Hearts, but she complained that there was too much to do before bedtime. When she did settle down, it was to have a cigarette and read a few chapters of her romance novel. After dinner, Lenny tended to the horses. I’d watch as he set a fresh plate of sugared water near the bees. Coming in the house following his chores, he invariably collapsed onto his recliner, exhausted.

  Just when I had given up on seeing Ernie again before school started, Mrs. Corley called to ask if he could spend a few days at our house. She was going out of town and thought Ernie would be better off staying with us than being with Jay and Maggie. Vivian told her that Ernie was welcome anytime.

  “Maybe Ernie’s visit will perk you up,” Vivian said.

  I was surprised she knew I had been feeling sad.

  Mrs. Corley dropped off Ernie with a small suitcase. She and Vivian went outside the back door and talked for a long time before Mrs. Corley came back inside to give Ernie a kiss and to tell him to be good. As soon as she was gone, Ernie and I rushed outside to play, picking up as if there had been no hiatus. We convinced ourselves that a pile of dirt was a burial mound and tore into it with shovels that we had taken from the barn. Our efforts didn’t bear fruit, and we came home empty-handed. Vivian let us stay up late and played dominoes with us. Lenny fell asleep while watching The Tonight Show.

  “Time for bed, Poppa,” Vivian coaxed, tugging Lenny’s arm.

  Lenny growled as she helped him out of the recliner.

  “You boys are lucky to be in this cool room,” Vivian said. “Wish we could afford a unit for the bedroom.”

  “Ugh,” Lenny moaned, pretending not to hear. He’d been complaining about me sleeping in the den because of the electricity it cost to keep it on all night. He was more likely to sell our one window unit than to get another.

  I was tired out and wanted to go right to sleep, but Ernie asked me not to turn off the light; he had something to say. I sat beside him with droopy eyes.

  Ernie leaned close. “Jay comes into my room at night. I want to show you what he does.”

  “Can’t we just go to sleep?” I asked, expecting him to show me another version of the tickle game.

  Ernie sprang to his feet. “I’m going to call Maggie. She’ll come over and get me. I don’t want to stay here!”

  I started to cry. “No, please don’t leave!”

  “Well, okay,” Ernie relented. “But you have to do what I say.” He shut off the light and came to the bed. “Take off your pajamas.”

  I didn’t know what Ernie was up to, but I didn’t want him to leave. I pulled off my pajama top and lay on my back. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I realized that Ernie had taken off his pajamas entirely and was sitting on the side of the folding bed.

  “Your bottoms, too,” Ernie demanded.

  I wanted to cry. Ernie was naked, and that was bad enough. He and I had bathed together, but this was strange.

  “I don’t want to,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t get mad.

  “Okay,” Ernie said, to my relief. “We’ll do it like before.”

  But it wasn’t exactly like before. This time, Ernie drew circles on my chest and ran rings around my belly button. He wasn’t tickling; he was touching. I expected him to grab my side or squeeze my knee at any second, and I braced myself for the assault. But Ernie’s finger ran wider circles around my body until his hand was over the elastic band of my pajama bottoms. He ran his finger over my thigh and down my leg.

  “So, what does Jay do?” I asked, confident this was another endurance game. I wanted to get it over with.

  “We can’t play that game,” Ernie said. “You didn’t take off your bottoms.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said, finally complying. I hoped the point wasn’t to grab the flashlight and embarrass me. As long as it was dark, I didn’t care so much that I was naked.

  “Here goes,” Ernie said.“This is what Jay does to me.” Ernie began to lick, puppylike, down my stomach toward the forbidden area. The closer Ernie got to where he shouldn’t, the darker the world became. I refused to acknowledge what he was doing. Nothing about it was funny. When Ernie stopped, he asked me to do it to him, but I pretended to be asleep.

  The next few days, playing outside during the day, we concocted fantasy expeditions through the woods and transformed the picnic table into a pirate ship. Ernie taught me to play catch, showing me how to wear a mitt and how to throw the ball “like a boy and not like a girl.”

  When night came and we were alone in the cool den, I pretended to be asleep while Ernie played Jay’s licking game.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  During my therapy session in Harris’s office, I watched him read what I had put down on paper. I almost ran out when he neared the last few paragraphs. No matter how hard I tried to brace myself, tears began flowing down my cheeks.

  “It’s all right to cry, Simon,” Harris consoled.

  His simple words released a flood of emotion. “But what am I crying about, Harris?”

  We sat in silence.

  “It feels like my childhood ended that night.”

  “It did,” Harris said, coming over to place a caring hand on my shoulder. “These are tears of mourning for your lost innocence.”

  Somewhere in my heart, I had to find the young boy who had disappeared that night.

  CHAPTER 5

  One blisteringly hot afternoon, Ernie convinced me to join the boys in a game of Simon Says. “Pick your nose,” the leader said. A few boys picked their noses, and when the leader said, “I didn’t say ‘Simon says,’” they joined others who had failed where they sat under a catalpa tree.

  Suddenly, Jay rode up on his bicycle, popping wheelies before sliding to a stop. After taking stock of the boys at his disposal, he challenged, “Are you a bunch of mommies’ boys?”

  Brave faces belied the fear in each boy’s heart. This neighborhood bully had terrorized everyone in some way. Jay took the troop to a ditch where the creek flowed under the main road and where the county had installed a manhole with a heavy iron cover. Under a slab of parched mud, he found a toad and, with great fanfare, plopped it on the scorching metal. The frog bloated and, with popping eyes, became a sizzle of burned flesh.

  Jay’s actions agitated Ernie more than it did the others. He had recently told me about locking his bedroom door to prevent Jay’s nightly visits. Though he didn’t explain, he said that Jay had started doing something that hurt.

  Jay took a string of firecrackers from his pocket—booty left over from the Fourth of July. He climbed a pine tree near the road and placed the fireworks between the twigs of a robin’s nest, but not without first holding up a baby chick. The poor creature strained its neck out pitifully. Jay lit the firecrackers and jumped to the ground. Boys ran in all directions as bloody carnage fell through the branches.

  “Yellow cowards!” Jay accused.

  The boys circled back and gathered under the catalpa tree. It provided only partial shade since worms had eaten away the leaves before these same boys plucked them off as fishing bait. Jay leaned agains
t the tree as he chewed on a twig and eyed the crowd. His silence was as dreadful as the firecrackers had been loud.

  The spell broke when one of the younger boys brought out a bag of marbles and swept away dirt to make a three-foot track. We began playing as if it were a normal afternoon, as if Jay weren’t lording over us. I was good at marbles, having developed my skills rolling cat’s-eyes along the ruts in the upstairs hallway at the mansion. After a few turns, I was winning the catalpa tree marbles tournament. When I knocked away the last marble and was ready to cheer my victory, Jay snapped off a dead limb and menacingly cracked it over his knee. He thrust the jagged stick in my face.

  “Ernie says that Simon’s a queer,” Jay said, leering at me. The accusation didn’t mean anything to some of the boys, but they all understood it was something bad, especially when Ernie responded forcefully.

  “Did not!”

  I had a good idea what “queer” meant. Whenever the flamboyant pianist Liberace appeared on evening variety shows, Lenny would jump to his feet and blurt out, “That goddamn faggot’s as queer as a three-dollar bill!”

  Did not had barely escaped Ernie’s lips before Jay knocked him to the ground and pinned his arms over his head.

  “Isn’t that what you said?” Jay demanded. “That your buddy’s a queer? That would make you a queer, too.”

  “I’m not a queer!” Ernie screamed. He struggled to get up, but Jay had his knees pressed on either side of Ernie’s head.

  A wry grin spread across Jay’s face. “I’ll let you go, but only if you hit Simon in the face.”

  “Aw right,” Ernie gasped. “Let me up.”

  Ernie brushed the dirt off his cutoffs, scraped sand from his forearms, stepped forward, and punched me square in the jaw.

  The boys rose in a unison cheer: Fight! Fight!

  I started to cry.

  “Sissy boy!” Ernie jeered.

  The others chorused, Sissy boy!

  Jay grabbed my wrists from behind and made me strike Ernie in mock punches.

  I may have been skinny and frail, but rage is a potent source of strength. Throwing off Jay’s grasp, I managed to turn around and butt him like a goat. Jay fell backward. I bolted across the field.

  Scaredy-cat! Crybaby! the boys yelled. Queer!

  The voices faded the closer I got to the road. From our side of the street, I looked back toward the catalpa and saw Jay riding away on his bicycle. He had succeeded in bringing mayhem and now would find some other group to torment.

  The boys had begun a new game of marbles by the time I slipped into the house.

  It turned out that Ernie had pulled his punch. Even so, I was not without injury. At dinner, Vivian prodded me to tell her what had happened, but the more she pressed, the more I fidgeted in my chair. Connie found Vivian’s prodding annoying and excused herself from the table, saying that she would miss her ride to choir practice. She had discovered a singing ability when Derek joined the church choir.

  “How is Ernie getting along?” Vivian asked me.

  I turned white.

  “Let him be,” Lenny interrupted. “That feller in the new house down the street said he saw Bubby in the field playing marbles today. Bubby’s making friends. That’s all we need to know.”

  Everyone knew that “Lenny’s boy don’t cotton much to others,” a phrase I had heard someone say at the grocery store. The person hadn’t known I was within earshot. It made Lenny proud to think that I was now starting to get along with the neighborhood boys. I was in a bind, made worse by the neighbor’s report.

  Sparky growled at the back door, and I saw an escape. “A raccoon might be out there in the garden,” I said. “Can I check and see?”

  Vivian allowed me to get up from the table, even though I was leaving behind the buttered lima beans I was supposed to eat.

  Sparky stopped barking as I stroked his fur. He had felt lonely hearing our voices inside. From the porch, the lights at Ernie’s house were visible in the distance. I wished he would come over and apologize. In the chance that he might, I stayed outside with Sparky until it was almost bedtime. Only the sound of whip-poor-wills and cicadas broke the stillness. I filled Sparky’s water dish from the faucet near the porch and gave him food from the plastic bin where we kept his kibbles.

  Vivian and Lenny were bickering when I came inside. I sneaked upstairs, afraid that I might be the subject of their argument. The rest of the night, I drew pictures of bug-eyed monsters attacking the earth in flying saucers.

  CHAPTER 6

  The night before starting second grade, I laid out my clothes on the toy chest that Lenny had tinkered together from a kit ordered through the Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog. I’d gotten the chest at the start of summer as a present for completing the first grade. Vivian drove me to school. I pushed open the heavy door of the Chevy sedan and braced myself for the expected ridicule, but the same boys who had taunted me after the tussle with Ernie asked where I’d been.

  It seemed they had forgotten about my being a sissy queer. I might have been able to forget as well had Ernie not taken a desk two seats in front of me. When I saw him, I started to get sick; the room began to spin and my vision grew blurry. The school bell rang. Class was about to begin, and I was sure I would throw up. I asked to go to the bathroom.

  Mrs. Beauchamp reprimanded me, saying, “You should have gone before the bell rang.” But she allowed me to leave the room.

  On my way out, a few classmates giggled.

  In the seclusion of the bathroom, I collapsed onto the floor and began sobbing. I lost track of time. Mrs. Beauchamp sent Heath to get me. From the stall, I told him that my stomach hurt and I couldn’t stand up. I was telling the truth. Heath fetched Mrs. Beauchamp. When she found me doubled over, she told Heath to run to the principal’s office.

  Mrs. Beauchamp walked me to the teacher’s lounge and laid me down on a couch. She brought a towel soaked in cold water and patted my face. I started choking. She realized I was about to vomit and grabbed a wastepaper basket. When I finished retching, she telephoned Vivian, who rushed to the school. Vivian’s diagnosis was “too much candy,” but she knew it must have been more than that.

  When we arrived home, Vivian sent me to bed. Mandy spoon-fed me milk of magnesia mixed with mineral oil—her cure for every ailment. What finally calmed me down was Vivian sitting on the side of the bed and massaging my temples.

  After school had let out for the day, Ernie showed up at the back door. Vivian knew I wasn’t sick with something contagious, and thought a visit from Ernie might do some good.

  “My brother is mean,” Ernie told me when Vivian left the room. “It’s easier if I do what he says.”

  The darkness that clouded Ernie’s face told me that he had stopped locking Jay out of his room at night. Ernie, never one to remain gloomy for long, reached under the covers to jab me in the side. I broke out laughing and gave Ernie a knee-gnaw. Within seconds, we had torn up the covers, wrestling. From the corner of my eye, I saw Vivian at the door, perplexed but relieved.

  It hurt deeply that, at school, Ernie avoided me even more than he had during first grade. Sometimes, walking home, Ernie appeared on the road to walk with me the rest of the way to the house. He often showed up when I fed Sparky in the evenings or dragged hay from the barn to feed Bracelet and Storm.

  We no longer playacted as intrepid explorers. There were no more adventures harpooning whales from the picnic table or tearing up mounds of dirt to look for treasure. When Ernie came over, we found someplace to be alone and did the things to each other that Jay did to Ernie.

  Ernie managed at school better than I did. For him, I simply didn’t exist when others were around. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Ernie and longed for the day to be over. Most of the time, I felt like crying. Often, that’s exactly what happened. The episodes would hit me without warning.

  Mrs. Beauchamp reached the limits of her patience. She appealed to Vivian and Lenny, saying that I needed professional help, and e
ventually set up a meeting with the principal, Mr. Klinghoffer, to force the issue.

  I sat silently in the room as the adults spoke about me. The principal’s description of my behavior—“One minute he is fine, then he starts babbling”—made me think of a story I remembered from Sunday school. I am legion, for we are many. Was I possessed? Was that why I did those things with Ernie?

  Lenny, incensed at Mr. Klinghoffer’s suggestion that his boy needed psychiatric help, charged Mrs. Beauchamp with incompetence and blamed Mr. Klinghoffer for employing unqualified teachers. As Lenny ranted, Vivian took me by the hand and we left the office. We may as well have been walking through a tunnel. Children rushed past, heading to their next classes, but all I sensed were shadows.

  Vivian opposed Lenny and allowed me to stay home for a few days. But Lenny demanded one morning that “this foolishness must end.” Mandy went downstairs early to eat her breakfast of toast and jam. When she left the room, I barricaded the bedroom door with the toy chest, and as much other furniture as I had the strength to move. When Mandy was unable to get into the room, Lenny stormed upstairs and pushed his way through. He watched to make sure I got dressed, then held my arm and led me to his van. The engine bellowed as Lenny threw it into gear. Then it spewed noxious fumes and died. Angrily, Lenny pushed the starter and pulled the choke, finally succeeding in keeping the motor running. He glared in my direction but said nothing as we pulled out of the driveway.

  Once we had parked, Lenny came to the passenger side and opened the door. I wrapped my arms through the steering wheel and refused to budge as Lenny tried to pull me out. Schoolmates gathered around the van. One little girl, whose playhouse butler I’d been during first grade, leaned in from the driver’s side door.

  “Come on, Simon,” she coaxed. “We’re going to play jacks before class.”

  “No!” I screamed. The girls’ games had been the start of my problems. I was a sissy queer for not playing baseball with the boys.